BUCKEYE, AZ — It was their first day on the job.
Pete Reveles and Oliberto Vasquez were good friends, inseparable. They were hired as day laborers to repair a wall at a feed barn at a West Valley cattle ranch.
Reveles was a 47-year-old father of two who worked as a handyman. The 55-year-old Vasquez had recently started his own company.
On a February morning last year, they were digging the footing for a wall. A stack of cement blocks from a nearby retaining wall collapsed, crushing them. Paramedics rushed to the scene, but the men were already dead.
Their families were left mourning with many questions about what happened that day.
“I was married to him going on 23 years. He's my high school sweetheart,” said Covina Reveles, his wife, in an interview with ABC15 last year.
She has now filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the Arlington Cattle Company and its owners.
The lawsuit alleges his death could have been prevented if the company had provided its employees training on the job’s hazards. The suit also alleges the ranch was negligent in “failing to maintain the premises in a safe and secure manner.”
In a response filed in court, the ranch’s owners maintained the man who hired the workers didn’t have their permission to hire the two men. The owners claim they were unaware the two men were even working at the ranch that day. They deny negligence and are asking a judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
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Attorneys for the Arlington Cattle Company did not respond to a request for further comment from ABC15.
The civil case was only recently filed in Maricopa County Superior Court and has not yet been scheduled for any hearings.
An investigation last year by the state’s worker-safety agency cited the company for safety violations, including not training an employee on the job hazards and for allowing an employee to operate a forklift without initial training. The Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health (ADOSH) fined the company $5,358. The company agreed to send at least one employee to an ADOSH safety class and to forklift training.
ABC15 has covered this workplace fatality extensively, including how the Industrial Commission of Arizona, the umbrella state agency over ADOSH, was for years giving automatic discounts to small Arizona companies on their safety fines.
These so-called “discounts on death” sometimes reduced company fines by as much as 70%.
The ABC story detailed how state officials have discretion on whether to grant these discounts in cases where workers die and the safety violations contributed toward their deaths. After ABC15’s story, the Industrial Commission has now moved away from granting automatic discounts.
Email ABC15 Investigator Anne Ryman at: anne.ryman@abc15.com, call her at 602-685-6345, or connect on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Facebook.
